From Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article:
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation
became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the
months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was
frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and
psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural
anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and
Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page
chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and
repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . .
. and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact
between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental
preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or
any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of
sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and
remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible
of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two
themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the
biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”
full: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_fact
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Anthropology News, November 2000, pp. 13-14
The AAA and the CIA?
by David Price
With little notice by anthropologists, there has been increasing
documentation of the extent to which American intelligence agencies
monitored and influenced the development of American social sciences
throughout the Cold War. One of the ways these agencies accomplished
this was through covert contact with professional associations -- either
as silent observers at professional meetings or as silent partners
entering into secret agreements with individual members or official
bodies within these associations.
A wide literature has developed that documents some of the interactions
between American social science professional associations and
intelligence agencies. Benjamin Harris documented the FBI's monitoring
of the American Psychological Association and the Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues since the 1930s. In Stalking the
Sociological Imagination (1999, Greenwood), Mike Keen used the Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) to document the FBI's surveillance of
prominent sociologists as well as the meetings of the American
Sociological Association. Christopher Simpson likewise established that
the "FBI and US military intelligence agents kept the American
Sociological Society conventions under surveillance in an effort to
smoke out radicals." Sigmund Diamond's book, Compromised Campus (1992),
used FOIA to painstakingly declassify CIA and FBI documents revealing
the extent to which post-war Area Studies centers were manipulated by
the CIA and Pentagon.
full: http://www.cia-on-campus.org/social/price.html
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